$25 million new scholarship investment from Mary Reisher and family, delivered to 27 Colorado colleges and universities, raises their giving to education well over $45 million

Mary and Nancy Reisher were children when their father drove the family from Kansas City to Lakewood, Colorado, in 1963 to take over a bank that operated out of a trailer in a shopping center parking lot.

They are not children anymore—Mary is the president and treasurer of the Reisher Family Foundation, Nancy sits beside her as a trustee, and this month the two of them, not some distant corporate machine, are the ones who signed off on the largest single scholarship investment their family has ever made: $25 million, delivered to 27 Colorado colleges and universities to mark 25 years of a program their parents started and that the sisters have spent the last several years quietly running themselves.

Their father, Roger Reisher, is the name most associated with the family’s fortune and its philanthropy, and for good reason.

Born in 1928 in a sod house on a small Nebraska farm, one of seven children, he served in the Army after World War II, then became the first person in his family to attend college, graduating from the University of Colorado in 1950 on the GI Bill.

He married Margaret, a home economist from Kansas who had likewise been the first in her family to earn a degree, and in 1963 he moved her and their two young daughters to Colorado to become the founding president of a startup bank that would eventually become FirstBank, the largest locally owned banking company in the state.

Roger ran it for 36 years, famously working standing up at a desk with no chair, and in 2001 he and Margaret used what that career had built to start the Reisher Scholars Program with The Denver Foundation—designed, deliberately, for the students everyone else’s scholarships miss: not incoming freshmen, but sophomores and community college transfers who are already proving themselves and just need help finishing.

What happened next is the part of this story that rarely gets told, because it isn’t a founding myth—it’s a succession, quieter and less mythologized, but no less deliberate.

As their parents’ direct involvement in the program’s day-to-day work receded, Mary and Nancy didn’t step back and hand things to professional trustees.

They stayed on the Reisher Scholarship Committee at The Denver Foundation, the body that actually reviews and approves where the money goes each year, and Mary took over as president and treasurer of the family foundation, with Nancy continuing as trustee—both unpaid, both still doing the work themselves.

Under their stewardship, the program has roughly tripled in reach. It has added a bridge scholarship for community college students before they transfer, launched at Fort Lewis College and, this year, at CU Boulder, and introduced a graduate scholarship so Reisher alumni can pursue a master’s degree without immediately taking on new debt.

More recently, the sisters directed a separate $1 million commitment to the Latin American Educational Foundation—a decision made in their parents’ name but entirely in their own hands.

By the time this year’s anniversary arrived, the program the sisters now oversee had put $45 million into the hands of more than 2,500 Colorado students, most of them first-generation, just like the parents whose names are on the fund.

This August, the timing of their decision carries a weight that has nothing to do with press releases. Just months before the $25 million announcement, the bank their father spent his life building stopped existing as an independent company.

FirstBank Holding Company was absorbed into PNC Financial Services in a $4.1 billion deal that closed in January, and the last of its branch signage across Colorado came down by early summer.

So in the same year the family name came down from the last bank branch their father ever built, Mary and Nancy Reisher turned around and put it on something bigger than it had ever been attached to before: the largest scholarship gift of their family’s history, aimed at 27 schools across the state that will spend every dollar within two years.

“This investment celebrates 25 years of transformative partnerships and positions the Reisher Scholars Program for its next chapter of growth,” said Javier Alberto Soto, president and CEO of The Denver Foundation, which has partnered with the family since Roger and Margaret first walked in the door.

It’s a foundation quote, but the decision behind it belongs to two sisters who grew up in the back seat of that 1963 move to Colorado and never stopped treating their parents’ promise as unfinished business—currently reaching students like Fort Lewis College’s Rosie Fool Head, who arrived in Denver at 15 from the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and Veko Mapenzi, who spent part of his childhood in a refugee camp in Malawi before a Reisher scholarship helped carry him to a four-year degree.